Teaching Students the Value of Social Media Currency
Tweets, retweets, posts, likes, followers, friends, shares — these are currency of social media. Those who produce content, whether they admit it or not, try to earn them even if it takes dolling out some of this currency themselves. But what if you didn’t know this currency existed? What if you didn’t strive for this currency and instead found yourself Tweeting, Facebooking, or Instagraming into a digital abyss? If you are trying to promote any kind of anything on social media, evidence of engagement matters. We want an active audience.
Over the past nine weeks, I have been working with my honors students at Moraine Valley Community College to better utilize social media — more specifically, Facebook and Twitter. The students have been given “the keys to the car” and allowed to post on behalf of the honors program on both social media sites. It may sound like a risky proposition, but I have had no issues with inappropriate content (thought I receive an alert on my phone each time there is a post). Our goal is to use social media as a means of promoting our growing program, connecting students with other institutions and activities, and providing a channel for students to highlight their work. The offshoot of these goals is to show students that social media is more than just “social” and using it effectively can yield excellent returns. Teaching students to make more effective social media content has been my greatest challenge.
The project, dubbed “Social Media Management,” began with dividing students into five groups. We broke the assignment into two, five-week rounds where each group was responsible for managing and creating content for both our honors program Twitter feed and our Facebook page. (For the sake of this article, I will focus much more on Twitter.) For round one, I was very specific on the content, naming specific goals for each Tweet and post, such as promoting a scholarship opportunity, informing followers of an on-campus event, etc. Students, with these specific directions, were able to meet these goals, but the number of followers and members rose mediocrely at best. Our content was thrown into the abyss, sans hashtags, links, or any other type of actionable content. Here is an actual tweet intended to promote the honors program:
There is no link to our honors program web page, no contact information — nothing actionable. I responded with a rather obvious question in an attempt to direct students to add more information, but was left hanging. There was a hashtag, but even clicking there led students to nothing more than related tweets — not the intended goal. This type of tweet was very common during the first several weeks of the project. Students simply were not familiar with the inner workings of the Twitterverse.
I realized after the first round that students needed to understand the aforementioned “currency” of social media. Using language from Nielsen’s new metric to measure TV-related Twitter activity, we had a lengthy class discussion about “reach” vs. “engagement”. To “reach” an audience is simply to have them “see” the content. That isn’t enough to meet our goals. We want true “engagement” where social media consumers take actions based on the content, be it retweeting, following, clicking on an enclosed link, etc. To illustrate this, I used candy (a popular teaching tool in my little world). I gave students mini Three Musketeers bars and adamantly asked them not to open the wrapper. The frustration built. The good stuff was inside. I asked, “What if that’s all you could do with that candy? What if you could only look at the wrapper?” I then asked students to unwrap the candy and smell the chocolate. Interest began to rise. I asked one student to throw the candy bar at me and, of course, he gladly obliged. That was fun. I then asked students to eat the candy bar (fingers crossed that no one had a chocolate allergy). “Are you engaged now?” I asked. As their mouths chopped on the gloriously chocolately and fluffy goodness, their heads nodded just the same. I followed with: “Would you go back and buy this candy bar?” Heads once again nodded.
Merely looking at the wrapper might have been enjoyable for those like me who are entertained by shiny objects, but the product wasn’t made to be a decorative knick-knack. It was made to devour, enjoy, and, most importantly, come back for more. That was true engagement. As the chewing continued, I had what I call a “teacher moment” when those light bulbs begin to shine above the students’ heads.
Once I established the distinction between “reach” and “engagement”, we needed to focus on the tools that allow us to first reach an audience and then have them engage. On Twitter, for example, the most effective means of promoting engagement are hashtags, mentions, and replies.
Students were surprisingly inept in their understanding of hashtags. Most of them created their own for sarcasm’s sake, which I must admit is one of my favorite pastimes. But I had to explain that hashtags were a digital version of “conversation labels”. In reality, they would be like posted signs near groups of people that allow others in the room to know what is being discussed. Rather than creating their own hashtags, I encouraged students to jump into the conversations already taking place, especially those that garnered big crowds. To find these, I introduced students to Hashtags.org, a site that monitors and posts popular hashtags in different categories and even lists hashtags that are trending up and down. If they created an original post, utilizing the site could be helpful in knowing where to enter the conversation. Perhaps more importantly, when struggling to think of content, scanning popular hashtags, and creating posts based on those was a sound strategy in earning some social media currency.
Students also failed to use actual Twitter handles of those individuals and entities related to the post. I explained to students that including a handle within a Tweet was the equivalent of tapping that person on the shoulder and saying, “Hey, I’m going to use your stuff!” This often elicits some kind of action from the person mentioned in the Tweet. For example, just this week, I tweeted an article from Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kot about pop sensation Lorde’s concert in the city. It was excellent writing and I wanted my students to give it a look. Kot, a busy, highly regarded writer, took the time to thank me for my compliment:
This is simple, but it is nonetheless interaction, and it never would have happened without using his Twitter handle in my post. (Note: I have yet to hear from Lorde.)
Just as any currency works, there is give and take. While we strive for interaction, we must interact ourselves in order to create and promote an environment of sharing. Our class began to focus on working together with other active and effective Twitter accounts on campus, such as our library, our fitness center, and the college’s main account. Retweets and responses have earned us some equity online and those accounts are beginning to return the “favor”.
As we move ahead, it’s apparent that students are beginning to get a firm understanding of the way Twitter and Facebook work. With that, I have “upped the ante” for Round 2. Students will be graded in a unique way, earning points for the number of retweets, follows, responses, favorites, likes, shares, and comments on our respective program social media accounts. There are certainly many factors in play and I will make certain that this is done fairly. Once all five groups have completed their weeks, I will take the average points earned by each group based on the “currency” and use that as the possible points earned. I will need to make some judgments, such as determining whether fake accounts were set up to create followers and checking for massive “please like our Facebook page” campaigns in order to earn points. With that said, in the spirit of the old monetary adage “a buck is a buck”, we can safely say that a “Follower” is a “Follower” and a “Like” is a “Like” in the battle for social media currency.
Jeremy Shermak is an assistant professor of Communications at Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, Illinois. You can follow him on Twitter @JeremyShermak.
